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The question

Does divorce take effect with the statement "consider her as one" without the intention of divorce, and is it permissible to follow a different madhhab concerning conditional divorce out of necessity?

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Source: FtawySummarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 20261 min readAlso available in العربية
The answer

The ruling concerning a wife's irrevocable divorce (baynunah) depends on matters known to the husband, not the questioner. This is explained as follows:

- The extent of the husband's awareness when he pronounced the first divorce during a state of anger. If the anger reached a state of unconsciousness, then the divorce is not valid.

- The husband's intention when he later declared her forbidden to him. Did he intend to confirm the previous divorce, or to initiate a new divorce, or to make an utterance of zihar, or did he not intend anything?

- The husband's intention behind his statements: "If you go to the soothsayers, then you are outside my marital bond," and "Consider it one." Was it a threat of divorce or not? Did he intend to make the divorce conditional upon an event? If so, there is a difference of opinion between the majority of scholars and Ibn Taymiyyah regarding this.

- The opinion that divorce is an expiable oath (yamin mukaffarah) in times of necessity is a weak one, and it is not advisable to adopt it unless the questioner seeks a fatwa from someone else and is reassured by their ruling.

The questioner must clarify what he meant by the "other situation" that intervened between the two situations in his previous question.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

Read the full answer on Ftawy